The Ray #2Review

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Watch Lucien royally botch meeting his girlfriend's parents.

By Erik Norris

The first issue of Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray and Jamal Igle's new Ray series was a decent start, but it didn't blow me away. I liked the new lead character, Lucien Gates, and Palmiotti and Gray seemed to have a solid handle on coming up with inventive ways to use his light-based powers; however, the book's threat wasn't established as smoothly. This left me mild, not hot, on The Ray's first issue. Flash forward a month to the release of The Ray #2, and I'm starting to warm up to this series.

Palmiotti and Gray continue to make Lucien a fascinating character who goes about balancing his regular life and superhero life completely ass-backwards (he might also be the only hero in the New 52 DCU able to break the fourth a la Zack Morris). It's a refreshing change of pace that remains The Ray's best quality. With that said, however, I'm still suspicious of how Gray and Palmiotti plan to effectively introduce this mini-series' villain into the ongoing plot.

So far he's been absent throughout most of this series, only showing up quickly in the first issue -- and again in issue #2, only out of frame -- before being pushed back into the closet to instead focus on mutated sea beasts taking over San Diego or bug androids wearing high heels (seriously...) kidnapping our women. I'm positive he plays a role in all this, but thus far the book's villain has been vastly underutilized.

One area of The Ray that I have been enjoying is Jamal Igle's artwork; it's nothing flashy, but it gets the job done. Igle displays a good sense of pacing and his panels are easy to follow to understand the story completely. And when Igle is given a moment to bust out a splash or spread page, he typically delivers.

The only area of The Ray that needs improvement is the series' villain. Gray and Palmiotti have created a great new Ray character, and now it's time to build up his first arch-nemesis. Hopefully Gray and Palmiotti can pull this off to make this series get a good bit better in subsequent future issues.